A version of this paper is published in Rural Rehabilitation: A Modern Perspective, (1998) T. Scott Smith (editor), Bow River Publishing, 455 Carmen Drive, Arnaudville, LA 70512, USA. ISBN 1-893481-07-7

By Don Richardson

TeleCommons Development Group

512 Woolwich Street

Guelph, Ontario, Canada

N1G 2W1

Tel: 519-821-5787 x 241

Web: http://www.telecommons.com

"The Internet makes me feel free of my disability... On the Net, I don’t feel like a handicapped person."

I’m "snow-stuck" today as I finish writing this paper. The wind howls outside my house, snow piles up in front of my doorstep and the radio tells me about all the school and office closings. On this cold January day in Canada I was supposed to drive to a meeting fifty miles away to meet with a rural development colleague, but I just received an electronic mail (email) message from her in which she confirms that the weather conditions are just as bad in her area. On days like this I wonder at how I used to work without my home computer, modem and Internet connection.

This chapter is meant to help rural rehabilitation practitioners and their clients understand the potentials, limitations and challenges of the Internet. Rural residents are no strangers to the communication challenges inherent in living within isolated and under-serviced areas. People in rural areas often have the most to gain from "getting on-line" and joining the tens of millions of members of the global Internet community. People with disabilities in rural areas now have an extremely powerful and adaptable communication tool that can reduce isolation and provide access to a vast range of services and information.

As a rural development practitioner I see everyday how rural people benefit from the Internet. Five years ago I made a decision to devote much of my career to helping rural people and farmers "get on-line." Since them my work has taken me across rural areas of Canada, Chile, Egypt, Mexico, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe to assist rural organizations and farmers’ groups to help their members to access the power of the Internet. I have seen first hand how farmers in rural Chile get better prices for their crops because they use the Internet to gain up-to-the-minute farm market information from the Chicago Board of Trade. I have seen how rural development practitioners in Senegal communicate across their country by email, bypassing a terribly inefficient postal service. In Canada I have seen how rural people in my own area use the Internet to sell hay and advertise free kittens to their neighbours.

Despite the snow that keeps me home today, I have had a very productive morning. In order to write a report, I sent and received several messages among colleagues in rural Egypt with whom I manage a communication project. Attached to email messages, I sent copies of a draft of a forty page paper on the Internet and rural development in Africa to colleagues in Rome, Johannesburg, Lusaka and Harare (total elapsed time: 15 seconds). I also managed to send an email note to my mother who is wisely waiting out the winter in a retirement park in Florida. Finally, I "surfed" the World Wide Web with my wife to book a room at a hotel in San Diego for a conference she will attend in a few weeks time.

The World Wide Web and email are now fully integrated into my life. For example, almost all of the references in this paper are from information I read from various rural or rehabilitation World Wide Web sites. The quote at the top of this article comes from a book (24 Hours in Cyberspace: Painting on the Walls of the Digital Cave (Smolan, 1996)) (http://www.cyber24.com) that I purchased and had delivered to my door from among the million books available from the Internet bookseller Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com). I use the World Wide Web to do much of my banking, and I routinely use it to look up phone numbers (http://www.four11.com), read the local rural newspaper (http://www.freespace.net/~freeprss/), read movie reviews before I head to the theatre, and even check TV Guide (http://www.tvguide.com/) to find out about what might be on TV.

I was not always an Internet enthusiast and I am all too aware of the Internet’s faults. As someone who really does not like computers, I can remember arguing vehemently that email is a tool for computer "geeks" and refusing to use an email system that had been installed in my university office. With pressure from my students however, I eventually relented and let my students teach me how to use email and how to "surf" the World Wide Web. After finding some very useful information and discovering that I could actually communicate with an old friend in northern Labrador, I was hooked. I quickly realized that this tool could revolutionize communication in the rural areas in which I work.

In 1993, with the help and encouragement of some enthusiastic students I set out to see if we could create a community oriented Internet service in the county surrounding my university. At that time there were very few non-computer-geeks using the Internet. However, a few pioneers in Canada and the United States were promoting the concept of "Freenets" or free access, community owned and managed computer communication networks connected to the Internet. My students and I learned everything we could about the Freenet movement and embarked on a two year community development initiative to create one of the first primarily rural community networks in North America. Today, the Wellington County FreeSpace network (http://www.freespace.net) serves 21 rural municipalities and one city. The lessons learned from that effort are now being applied in rural communities around the world (Richardson, 1995, 1996a, 1996b). In the process of developing FreeSpace, I also learned a great deal about the Internet, its history, its limitations, and its empowering nature.

One of the most popular features of the Internet, electronic mail, is directly related to a technology developed to assist people with disabilities. The Internet was conceived in 1963 by Larry Roberts while he was working for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) with funding from the U.S. Department of Defence (Negroponte, 1995). ARPAnet, as it was then called, emerged as a communication tool in the late 1960's for a handful of Defence workers and contractors. It was designed to be a fail-safe communication system because it would be a fundamentally decentralized network. Computers could send packets of information from one computer to another, across the United States, and those packets could travel through a variety of different routes to reach their destination. If one or several routes is destroyed or malfunctioning, the packets find alternative routes and eventually reach their destinations.

ARPAnet grew during the late 1960's and throughout the 1970's because new "nodes" and routes were added to reach University researchers. One of the ARPAnet engineers was used to communicating with his hearing impaired wife using a telephone text messaging device (TTY) and this influenced him to incorporate text messaging between people (not just between computers) as a feature of ARPAnet (Brummel, 1995). This feature became known as electronic mail or email, and now millions of email messages now criss-cross the globe every day. During the ARPAnet stage of the Internet, the many benefits of text-based electronic mail attracted some enthusiastic users. As a wider community of faculty and students outside the Department of Defence began to use the tool, electronic mail quickly gained popularity across university and college campuses in North America. Because it was a decentralized network, there was little way to control its popular expansion, and it soon transcended its Department of Defence mentors.

The Internet today is a peoples’ network. Anyone with basic computer equipment and a phone line can connect to it, communicate through it, host information on it, and look through it. Unlike many other media such as television and radio, every user of the medium can be an information producer and knowledge sharer. No one knows for sure how many people are using the Internet today, but estimates range from 50 to 100 million people, and it is growing fast. In countries such as Thailand, Internet use is growing at a current rate of close to 1,000% per year.

The Internet is essentially millions of people connected together via millions of computers that are connected together. By now, almost everyone who reads this article will know something about the Internet, but not everyone will know quite what it is or what it represents. There are at least 5 million information-containing computers serving information to the millions and millions of Internet users. Each of those 5 million computers may contain thousands, or hundreds of thousands of pages of information. If current trends continue, there will be over 100 million computers connected to the Internet by the year 2000 (Carroll & Broadhead, 1995). Any one of those computers linked to the Internet might support one individual or thousands of individuals, together with the wealth of information they can contribute to the Internet.

There two powerful tools that form the basis of the Internet. The earliest on the scene, and still the most popular, is email. Using a simple address to guide them, email messages jump from computer to computer, rapidly finding their way to their recipients. The more recent tool, and the one that has catapulted the Internet into popular culture, is the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is the part of the Internet where we are witnessing the emergence of a vast global library of information.

Electronic publishing of information on the World Wide Web is much less expensive than print publication. It is also very easy to become a provider of information on the World Wide Web and have people use your information almost instantaneously from virtually any location in the world. As a result the World Wide Web is propagated with information on every subject imaginable. In fact, virtually any Internet user who wants to publish a work can do so for little or no money and make that work available around the globe. The World Wide Web is in its infancy, having only been developed in 1994, yet only three years after its birth it is one of the most popular information sharing tools in the world. Use of the World Wide Web is growing at a rate of 25% per month and it is estimated that some 100 to 400 new information sites are established on the World Wide Web each week (Carroll & Broadhead, 1995).

Prior to the World Wide Web, Internet users were limited to email communication and cumbersome methods for retrieving files of information from other computers. The World Wide Web changed that quite dramatically. Now we can retrieve information, documents, and a wide variety of audio-visual material simply by pointing and clicking. We do not even have to know the location of the computer from which we retrieve information. We just click on a highlighted word, or a picture and within moments a document is transported to the screen in front of us. Some argue that the Internet’s World Wide Web is humanity’s second major communication revolution; the first being the Gutenburg Press in 1439 (Burke & Ornstein, 1995).

Compared to the costs of using telephones or faxes, communicating and sharing information using email or the World Wide Web can be hundreds of times less expensive. Because information flows through the Internet in discrete packets of digital bits, those packets are able to share telecommunication lines with hundreds of other packets. Where a traditional trans-Atlantic telephone call will tie up a single phone line for only two people, an email message can travel along a phone line with hundreds and even thousands of other messages. Some creative computer software developers have even made use of this feature of the Internet to create Internet telephone services that allow users to speak with other users, around the globe, while completely avoiding long distance phone charges.

The Internet is criticized from many fronts, and like any communication technology it can be used for purposes that run counter to common social values. Despite the fact that the Internet is growing in popularity and the demographics of its user base are rapidly changing, it is still very much an elitist network. The typical Internet user is white, male and wealthier than average (Weber, 1996), but as the Internet expands around the world (particularly with phenomenal growth in Asia) the profile of the average user is changing. Several years ago it was estimated that only 5-10% of Internet users were female. In 1996 that percentage had increased to about 33% and it continues to increase.

Internet access is still determined by access to expensive computer equipment. This tends to limit use among lower income groups. Programs promoting Internet access centres at public libraries and school labs in lower income areas are helping to improve this situation, but growth among lower income groups is slow. Some anticipate that the commercial release of low-cost Internet adapters for televisions could radically change current user demographics.

No discussion of the Internet would be complete without mention of the more deviant uses of the Internet. The popular media have paid a significant amount of attention to deviant uses of the Internet by relatively small numbers of people. Deviant uses, such as the circulation of child pornography or hate literature, are certainly serious problems. The Internet is not responsible for the deviant behavior. Just as it enables a physician to freely circulate health information that can save lives, it also allows people to publish information that may not be healthy for our families and communities.

The Internet is like a community, and every community has its deviants. Like any community, the Internet is continually developing its own standards of acceptable behavior and it is finding ways to police itself. The Internet is not a technological monster as some sensationalist articles would have us think. The Internet is powered by people, not computers. As the Internet community expands, new voices will be added to discussions aimed at resolving the problems associated with deviant use. These problems may never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Some say that the freedom of speech inherent in the Internet is both its most positive strength and its own worst enemy.

As a more and more people gain access to the Internet, the more powerful the Internet becomes for everyone. Each publication of health information, each crayon colored image of a child’s artwork, and each folk story from a native elder adds value to the Internet. All things considered, the Internet is a cheap, powerful, and decentralized communication medium that is firmly in the hands of civil society. It is also the first globally accepted media tool that allows every user to be a sender, receiver, and broadcaster. Like any communication tool it has its drawbacks, but no other communication tool has ever come close to the human promise embodied by the Internet.

For rural people, the Internet is a valuable communication tool to add to the current suite of communication tools which typically includes the telephone, mail, and the fax machine. In my county, for example, to telephone or fax from one end of the county to the other involves a long distance phone charge. However, with Internet access (usually costing a flat monthly rate of about $20.00 or less) a person can send any number of email messages around the county for nothing. The cost savings for international communication are tremendous. Given that rural people in developing countries often pay at least $10.00 to send a single page fax to North America and that local mail services in those countries are often unreliable, it is no wonder that rural people in developing countries are excited about using the Internet.

Despite the value of the Internet for rural use, people in rural areas do not generally have the same access to the Internet as their urban peers. In Canada, where by July of 1996, over 29% of adults had used the Internet (Leitch, 1996), we can safely say that urban users outnumber rural users by about 2:1. Estimates of the number of rural households that use the Internet in North America range from 8% to 15%. The reasons for the lower number of rural users are complex but largely centre around the question of political will to upgrade telecommunication infrastructure. Telecommunication infrastructure in many rural areas in North America is antiquated. Old telephone systems make it difficult for communities or companies to provide the digital and high-speed lines required for quality Internet service provision. In less developed countries many rural regions do not even have phone service. To live in a rural area, no matter where in the world, often means having poorer telecommunication infrastructure than urban neighbours.

In the Province of Ontario, where I live, over 30,000 households still have party line service which makes it difficult or impossible to even use a telephone answering machine or fax machine. Old rotary dial phones, an obvious indicator of an old analog (non-digital) phone system, are common in rural areas. Rural residents, like everyone else, are commonly frustrated by digital telephone answering services and voice mail "mazes" operated by government offices and corporations. For many rural residents the frustration is greater because their analog phone systems do not enable them to punch the buttons that make the tones asked for by these systems.

Poor Internet access and rotary phone frustrations are only a couple of the symptoms of the poor condition of many rural telecommunication systems. Other symptoms are probably only too obvious to people with disabilities who are often denied access to the technologies that can aid communication access among their urban peers. Various telephone service and computer communication enhancements available to the hearing impaired and the visually impaired may be completely unavailable to rural people who reside at the end of antique phone systems. Antiquated infrastructure may also mean that telecommuting job programs for people with disabilities are also be unavailable to people in rural and remote communities. A very serious problem is the unavailability of 911 services in rural areas that are not served by digital telecommunication lines and switches. As well, health care providers in such areas are unable to take advantage of new advances in tele-medicine such as video-conferencing or distance learning professional development opportunities.

Investments in rural telecommunication upgrades are dependent upon decisions made by politicians, government regulators and telecommunication company executives. Without strong and vocal pressure from rural constituents, these decision-makers may not even realize that rural communities are underserviced. Ironically, the Internet is contributing to an entirely new advocacy effort directed at upgrading rural telecommunication systems. Driven primarily by frustrations at not being able to use the Internet effectively, rural community organizations and farmers’ organizations are banding together to demand improvements in rural telecommunication service. People who might never have had an interest in digital telecommunication are becoming self-taught experts and are learning about all the various kinds of telecommunication services that they may have been denied for the last decade.

Our survey results provide a useful picture of why rural people want to use the Internet. Rural Internet users report that the Internet provides them with a very convenient method for quickly accessing a large volume of information without being impeded by geographic barriers. They further report finding significant information value from the Internet in the form of new ideas, discussion groups, access to expert advice, continuing education resources, increased global understanding and cultural awareness, and information that helps make them better and more informed citizens. Additionally, they report social benefits including new opportunities to overcome geographic isolation, increased social interaction, opportunities to organize and advocate for social change, equilization of urban/rural disparities and new links between urban and rural communities.

The survey results also show that rural business and agri-business users highlight the Internet’s value in enabling them to expand their markets to global audiences and to establish national and global business networks and alliances that would otherwise be inaccessible to rural based businesses. Among all respondents, over 68% ranked the Internet as one of their top three sources of information, second to magazines (62%) and newspapers (41%). This indicates that as rural users discover the range of information available from the Internet, it quickly becomes their preferred source of new information.

The main obstacles cited as hindering other rural people from getting on the Internet were lack of knowledge and training opportunities, together with lack of rural Internet service providers. This indicates an area for government and non-governmental organization interventions to improve rural access to the Internet. In Canada and elsewhere, governments are beginning to respond to this situation by creating special programs to promote rural Internet access. For example, by 1998 the Canadian Community Access Project (CAP) (http://cnet.unb.ca/cap/) will have helped over 1,500 small rural communities to establish "community access sites" at rural libraries and town offices to help rural people discover the value of the Internet and to help catalyze the growth of commercial Internet service in rural areas (Industry Canada, 1997). In the United States, the Rural Datafication Project (http://www.rural.net), funded through the National Science Foundation, is helping to bring the Internet to rural and underserviced communities in the Great Lakes region and the Upper Midwest.

Over 83% of the survey respondents reported an interest in taking courses over the Internet which indicates that there are many opportunities to offer on-line training programs and distance education services to rural people via the Internet. The demand for such on-line training and distance education has not yet been met and the field of Internet-based distance education is still emerging. There are many opportunities for creative training services directed at people with disabilities, as well as for professional upgrading and certification for the people who provide them with services.

One of the most revealing trends noted from the survey data is the speed at which Internet use is growing in rural areas. Almost 90% of respondents said that they joined the Internet only in the past two years. About 60% had joined the Internet in the past year and 33% said that they had joined the Internet within five months of responding to our survey. All indications are that Internet use rates in rural areas will continue to grow. Indeed, many rural-oriented government and non-government information service providers are beginning to institute Internet policies recommending that more and more client services be made available for Internet access.

Benefits to rural rehabilitation practitioners and their clients likely mirror those for the general rural population. Once a person is connected, the Internet provides relatively barrier free access to information and access to a world of advice, ideas and discussion. It also may provide a wide variety of social benefits ranging from reduced geographic isolation, to increased social interaction and new opportunities to organize and advocate for social change. As well, while using the Internet people do not generally know what you look like, or whether or not you can see, hear or use a computer keyboard. It can be a medium of communication that reduces the perceived importance of physical differences.

Information for rural rehabilitation practitioners and their clients is easily available on the World Wide Web. One of the best places to start is "Untangling the Web: Where Can I Go to Get Disability Information," (http://www.icdi.wvu.edu/Others.htm#g9) a comprehensive and continuously updated list of resources maintained by Steven L. Fullmer at the West Virginia Rehabilitation Research & Training Center (http://www.icdi.wvu.edu/). From here an Internet user can link to rehabilitation information from around the world covering every imaginable topic. A commercial service, Disability.com (http://disability.com), provides a comprehensive list of links to disability information, including an excellent page of links to resources on computer and software aids.

The growing popularity of the Internet must certainly be a factor in the on-going development and marketing of computer and software aids for people with disabilities. As more people obtain access to computers to communicate over the Internet, the markets for innovative software and hardware aids grows. A very good source of information on such technical aids comes from the Apple computer company and its "Disability Connection" (http://www2.apple.com/disability/welcome.html). Here one can find excellent fact sheets on a variety of tools and techniques together with links to the various companies providing services and products. At Webable (http://www.yuri.org/Webable/index.html) one can find a variety of discussion papers on communication technology and disabilities, as well as a variety of disability related Internet resources.

The last few years have seen some remarkable developments in computer devices and techniques for people with disabilities. Keyboards, a problem for many people with disabilities, can be replaced with a variety of adaptive head, mouth and even eye tracking computer input devices and techniques. You can then type with almost any part of your body, or avoid keyboards altogether with computer "touch" screen applications that use images and icons. Adaptive Computer Technologies Inc. (http://www.adaptive-computer.com/), even makes a specific set of Internet tools for people who cannot type. One of their tools even enables non-typers to create the tedious "html" (hyper-text mark-up language) documents that produce World Wide Web pages on computer screens. Laptop mounting devices for wheelchair users and wireless computer modems are other tools that can be creatively adapted by "Web surfing" people with disabilities.

Until recently, if you could not read written words, then computers were largely inaccessible to you, but even this barrier is being removed for some. The visually impaired and those with literacy problems can make use of software that translates email messages and World Wide Web pages into speech, providing users with full descriptions of all the elements of a Web page (RTA Online, 1996), as well as Braille computer displays. There are also computer screen magnifiers, and voice activated "Web browsers" to make using the World Wide Web easier. There have also been some significant developments in the application of speech synthesizers to enable computers to recognize everyday speech and translate that into text.

The Internet still has a long way to go to be "user friendly" for people with disabilities. People with disabilities who "surf the Web" may encounter many problems with the Web pages they use. Because the Web is completely decentralized, there are few standards to ensure that Web pages are designed with disabled users in mind. As a result, most Web pages are not designed to be compatible with text-to-speech translation tools, and many pages have simple design flaws such as small type and complicated background graphics that can make reading difficult.

One tool that can help Web page designers to create better Web pages is "Bobby" (http://www.cast.org/bobby/) from the Center for Applied Special Technology in Maryland. From the "Bobby" Web page, a user types in the address for a Web page and "Bobby" responds back with an annotated version of that page complete with recommendations for improvements that will reduce disability access problems. "Bobby" quickly points out problems such as graphic images that have no accompanying text description that can assist audio output devices, or audio files that have no accompanying text description.

People who work in the field of rural rehabilitation can also use the Internet to increase the efficiency of their efforts and to save money on telecommunication costs. The provision of health care and social services in rural areas is never easy and involves unique administrative and organizational communication challenges. Internet tools can assist in the organization of the delivery of care and service by helping to streamline delivery mechanisms, collect delivery data and improve accounting procedures.

Many service organizations are now using internal "Intranets" to achieve significant information management efficiencies and cost savings. "Intranets" use the same technology as the Internet but are dedicated only to secure information management within an organization or company. Similar to the powerful "groupware" programs that are used in large corporations to improve information management (such as Lotus Notes), but much less expensive to implement and update, "Intranets" are finding a popular niche in small and medium size organizations. Organizations that have staff distributed over wide geographic areas can benefit significantly from the use of an organizational "Intranet." "Intranet" software is one of the most rapidly expanding software industries, largely due to the software’s ease of use, small requirements for user training and the seemless way in which "Intranets" connect to the Internet.

People with limited mobility and other disabilities may not have easy access to public libraries, workplaces

or retail stores. In rural areas this problem can be significantly magnified due to geographic distance and the underserviced nature of many rural communities. Internet use can now make library information (and much, much more) accessible, can enable people to telecommute to work, and can enable people to buy and sell products on-line. The Internet may not reduce existing barriers, but it can open access to alternative services and tools for people with disabilities in rural areas. It can also provide people with disabilities in rural areas with opportunities to communicate with people from all over the world as well as to creatively network and share ideas with other people with disabilities, regardless of geographic location.

Many Internet proponents like myself dream of a day when there will be universal access to the Internet and other digital telecommunication services. To achieve that dream requires an organizational effort to promote Internet and digital telecommunication access to all segments of society and all geographic areas. Achieving universal access for rural people with disabilities requires a special effort. Agencies that support services for people with disabilities must recognize the specific needs and barriers that face their rural clients with regard to digital telecommunication and Internet access.

Policy makers must be made especially aware of the challenges facing people with disabilities in rural areas, particularly now that countries such as Canada and the United States are focusing attention on general issues of universal access to digital telecommunication services. If the design and development of universal service provision does not include accommodation for the technical and training requirements of providing people with disabilities, regardless of geographic location, with appropriate telecommunication choices then "information utilization by persons with a variety of disablities will be set back to the days before the development of computers" (Brummel, 1994). There is still a lot of work to be done to help policy makers understand and act on these issues.

It is common to end academic papers with a call for further research. This one is no different, but the need for further research is clearly evident. At present, the research on rural rehabilitation and telecommunication is almost non-existent. People with disabilities in rural areas are using the Internet, and it is important to document and learn from their efforts. It is equally important to create dialogue among these Internet users to help others benefit from their experience and to help policy makers, computer hardware manufacturers, software designers, and telecommunication service providers understand the particular issues that they face. People who work in the field of rural rehabilitation and who understand the value of computer-based communication can play a special role in supporting research studies and catalyzing advocacy efforts.

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